In the Iraq War, People Acting Like Animals, and Vice Versa

LOS ANGELES — “It’s alarming, this life after death,” muses one of the many ghosts that haunt a ravaged city in Rajiv Joseph’s play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.” Of course, life before death was no ticker tape parade for Mr. Joseph’s cast of characters, either. Set in the chaotic first days of the American invasion of Iraq, this boldly imagined, harrowing and surprisingly funny drama considers the long afterlife of violent acts, as well as the impenetrable mysteries of the afterlife itself.

A worthy finalist for the recent Pulitzer Prize in drama that went to a nonfinalist, “Next to Normal,” “Bengal Tiger” was first staged under the auspices of the Center Theater Group at the Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City, Calif., last year. Michael Ritchie, the artistic director of the company, has remounted the production at the larger Mark Taper Forum downtown here, with Moisés Kaufman again directing a first-rate cast.

It features a grizzled Kevin Tighe as the curmudgeonly tiger of the title. This creature’s profane musings on the cosmos and the nature of man and beast provide tasty comic diversion from Mr. Joseph’s bleaker considerations of the legacy of brutal acts taking place both before and after the American occupation.

The surly tiger lopes around his cage in the play’s opening scene, crowing at the stupidity of the so-called king of the jungle. (Mr. Tighe isn’t given any silly costuming, thank heavens, but simply wears tattered clothes.) All eight of the zoo’s lions, he informs us with grim satisfaction, hit the streets when a bomb destroyed one of the walls of their habitat. They were shot dead by American soldiers.

But as Mr. Joseph’s play illustrates in scenes of jittery intensity, using your head isn’t as easy as it seems in the turbulence of war, under the influence of fear, instinct and conditioned responses. This wise tiger himself soon falls prey to primal urges, and bites off the hand of Tom (Glenn Davis), one of the American soldiers guarding the zoo. Kev (Brad Fleischer), Tom’s hot-headed and dimwitted fellow soldier, instantly fires off a few rounds, making quick work of the unfortunate beast.

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Glenn Davis, seated, and Brad Fleischer in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” Rajiv Joseph’s play at the Mark Taper Forum.Credit
Craig Schwartz

“This is just wonderful!” the tiger gripes, dying. “I get so stupid when I get hungry.”

The aftereffects of these bloody deeds spread forth on levels practical, psychological and metaphysical, rippling outward like waves in a dark pool. Mr. Joseph’s play is wonderfully daring in its imaginative scope, convincingly evoking the fraught relationships between the occupying American soldiers and the frightened, suspicious Iraqi civilians.

But it also exhumes the ugly ghosts of the Hussein regime — Saddam’s cocky, vicious son Uday is among the play’s spectral presences — to illustrate how fear, repression and violence had corrupted the culture even before the invasion spawned an explosion of factional conflict.

Kev finds himself haunted by the ghost of the tiger, who wanders the city taking in the grim sights. Increasingly rattled by this otherworldly presence, Kev lands in the hospital after an irrational outburst during a routine search of an Iraqi household. Back in Baghdad with a prosthetic hand, Tom pays a visit to Kev less out of compassion for a broken-minded buddy than for a more practical purpose.

The gun Kev used to shoot the tiger was one of the gold-plated bits of booty Tom had swiped from the gaudy palace of Uday Hussein (Hrach Titizian). With an eye toward staking a new life back home, Tom wants that gold gun back, along with the similarly gilded toilet seat he acquired. Although Mr. Joseph’s play is no polemic against the Iraq war, Tom’s determined pursuit of this glistening lucre resonates as a metaphor for the possibly murky motives behind the American invasion.

As it happens, in the chaos of Kev’s breakdown the gun fell into the hands of Musa (Arian Moayed), one of the translators working with the troops. The weapon has a terrible, talismanic significance for Musa, who was formerly employed as a gardener by Uday and finds himself visited by his chuckling ghost. As heartlessly brutal in death as he was in life, Uday carries his brother Qusay’s head around with him in a plastic bag, playing with it like a new toy, and taunts Musa with gloating references to the rape and murder of his beloved sister.

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Kevin Tighe as the tiger in his cage at the Bagdhad zoo.Credit
Craig Schwartz

Mr. Joseph evokes these disparate characters with remarkable facility, and the cast imbues each with a vivid, complicated humanity. (That includes Mr. Tighe’s wry tiger.) Mr. Fleischer is cartoonishly funny as the dopey Kev in the early scenes, but his performance grows more moving as this stereotypically jingoistic, thoughtless soldier learns just how easily — and irrevocably — the trauma of witnessing (and inflicting) violence can poison a young man’s mind.

Mr. Davis is similarly affecting as Tom finds his own guilt over the chain of events manifesting itself in ghostly form. (Mr. Joseph has also written for Tom a frankly sexual scene that is mordantly funny but somehow touching, too, in its understanding of the grittier consequences of losing a useful appendage.)

Mr. Moayed’s Musa is no less nuanced, an honorable man who is eager to improve his English but grows increasingly disturbed by the behavior of soldiers ill equipped to understand the complex workings of the culture into which they’ve been thrust, and brutalized by the threat of violence surrounding them. Musa’s own moral decline, Mr. Joseph makes clear, derives from a mixture of his responses to the tumult of current events and the trauma of his own past under the Hussein regime: a toxic combination.

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Interspersed with the nerve-rattling scenes of violence on the streets of Baghdad are the intimate exchanges between the living characters and the dead. Mr. Joseph’s poetic imagination envisions the afterlife as a place where the formerly alive are visited by “all sorts of revelations about the world and existence,” as the tiger puts it. A soldier’s ghost can find himself suddenly discoursing on the birth of algebra, or a big, bad cat can make casual references to Dante.

Occasionally this conceit is overly cute (annoyed at the existential confusion of his fellow ghosts, the tiger says, “You’re dead and you’re in Baghdad — shut up”) or laden with strained significance. There are a few speeches in which the play states its points too plainly, like the tiger’s repeated calls on the absent God to come prune the unruly garden he has left to man’s misbegotten tending.

But Mr. Joseph’s embracing compassion for his characters and their dark journeys through the streets of Baghdad and beyond easily redeems the minor flaws of some overstated or archly poetic writing. “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” doesn’t flinch in its depiction of the brutal consequences of violence, but this haunting new play also offers a consoling vision of a world beyond our own, where the wisdom in such eternally short supply on earth can be harvested by those with open hearts. Too bad you have to be a ghost to get there.

A version of this review appears in print on May 15, 2010, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: In the Iraq War, People Acting Like Animals, and Vice Versa. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe